For the European hard right and the White House, it seemed almost too good to be true: left-liberal Spain punished with a migration crisis of its own making.

The histrionics came right on cue. As thousands of mainly Moroccan citizens streamed into the tiny Spanish enclave of Ceuta at the tip of north Africa, Spain’s far-right party Vox decried a migrant “invasion”, blaming Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez’s regularisation and leftist politics. The Trump administration did the same. A senior Israeli diplomat goaded Madrid over its “colonial” territories while Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, called for Spain to be suspended from the Schengen area. Denmark and Finland backed Italy’s move and, by the weekend, 22 EU leaders had penned a letter pointing an implicit finger at Madrid over its presumed failure to “relentlessly combat illegal migration”.

But what these self-ascribed doyens of border control don’t want to understand is that it’s their panic and politicking over migration that has brought us here.

Ceuta is hardly a poster-child for Spain’s otherwise liberal migration policy. Rather, since the 1990s it has been the prototype for Europe’s relentless border security battle. Drones, heat detectors, motion sensors, digital watchtowers, Moroccan Auxiliary Forces: Ceuta’s border is so thoroughly militarised that it puts even Trump’s barrier-building – let alone that of Greece, Poland or Finland – to shame.

The paradox, as civil guards told me when I last visited in 2023, was that this militarisation had involved ceding control. “Rabat knows it can destabilise Spain with migration,” one chief said, as he reflected on the mass entry of Moroccans in 2021, after Madrid had angered its partner by taking in........

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